Quote of the Day

To “defund the police” – which means, more explicitly, “to take some amount of resources we currently give to armed police and reallocate those resources towards social services, drug treatment, or other intelligent programs that target the root problems of crime effectively” – is a good idea. No honest and reasonable person should disagree with the underlying premise of defunding the police, no matter how much they might gripe about the slogan itself. If the Democratic Party thinks that “defund the police” is a bad slogan, they should think of another way to describe these good and reasonable policy ideas.

Instead, they are just going to scream about how much they love cops.

Even as the political center of the Democratic Party has been pulled ever so slowly to the left in recent decades, the Clinton-era thirst for triangulation still burns bright in the souls of the party’s tottering old leaders. Although the main proposition of progressives is that the future can be better than the past, the urge of the Democrats to jump up and prove that they can be just as retrograde as Republicans is proving inescapable. Nothing defines the modern Democratic Party more than its consistent refusal to embrace its own beliefs, due to projected fears over what voters might think.

. . . Legitimate progressives – those who are willing to advocate for positions because they are just, not because they are politically expedient – have spent many decades gritting their teeth while Democrats wink and assure them that yes, they agree with the goal, but in order to get there we must have a long masquerade of pretending not to agree with the goal, because voters demand that we Be Tough. Invariably, the passage of time proves that the just position was where everyone should have been all along. History is littered with the disgraced corpses of politicians who took positions that they knew were unjust, but that they considered to be politically necessary. That is how all of the evil things happen – with the acquiescence of leaders who consider themselves to be realists.

– Hamilton Nolan
Excerpted from “Democrats Will Never Stop
Triangulating Against Justice”
In These Times
August 3, 2021

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “An Abolitionist Demand”: Progressive Perspectives on Transforming Policing in the U.S.
• Something to Think About – July 21, 2020
• The Language of the Oppressor
• Remembering Philando Castile and Demanding Abolition of the System That Targets and Kills People of Color
• David Sirota: Quote of the Day – January 26, 2021
• Cornel West: Quote of the Day – December 3, 2020
• David A. Love: Quote of the Day – November 27, 2019
• John Atcheson: Quote of the Day – October 19, 2019
• Brian Geving: Quote of the Day – July 20, 2019
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Quote of the Day – March 10, 2019
• Lydia Howell, Errol Louis and Emily Atkin: Quotes of the Day – February 26, 2019
• Ross Barkan: Quote of the Day – June 27, 2018
• Jake Noval: Quote of the Day – September 7, 2017

Image: Kristen Solberg.